I put Victor Serge alongside of Vasily Grossmanas an awe-inspiring Russian writer of whom I knew next to nothing, brought to my attention by the wonderful New York Review of Books Press (and also by my friend who recommended Kolyma Tales.) Serge’s novels are not, in fact, well known at all; certainly not here in America. He wrote in French, was published in French, and was saved from death in the Gulag because of the outcry of French literary intellectuals who were acquainted with his work. Good thing he knew French! His novels were only first published in English in the early 1970s.

Serge was born Victor Lvovich Kibalchich, in 1890, the son of anti-Tsarist agitators living in exile in Belgium. He grew up in the militant atmosphere of exiled socialist-communist revolutionaries, and only set foot in Russia in 1919, after years of agitation, prison, writing, various exiles, and a life of poverty. He landed in Petrograd/Saint Petersburg/Petersburg/Leningrad in the midst of the terrifying five-year Russian Civil War, and threw himself into The Revolution. He remained a committed revolutionary, but retained his fierce independent (was it anarchist?) bent, and was quick to recognize the ‘betrayal of The Revolution’ that Stalin represented. From there, it was all downhill.

His writings are unique in their blend of intense sympathy for the revolutionary cause, their unflinching recognition of the crimes committed in its name, their profound disgust with the course of the Soviet revolution, their poetic style, and the modernistic techniques he absorbed from European literary developments. No plain social realism, no bitter denunciations of the cause betrayed, no simple answers. Most interesting to me: he focuses like a laser on the questions of just how people can believe they are struggling for the better future of humanity while committing acts they know to be outrageous crimes; and why did so many people simply carry on with their work, fatalistically expecting to be unjustly arrested, tried, and perhaps executed?

The shortest of these three novels here, Conquered City, was the first written, and takes place in Petrograd during the siege he witnessed beginning in 1919. The physical privation of citizens is horrifying. The novel is actually a series of vignettes, some of which take place out of the city on the various fronts of the civil war, and which introduce characters from all realms of the Russian Empire: bandits, intellectuals, proletarian communists, proletarian White sympathizers, counter-revolutionaries, Party leaders, and on. Serge depicts them all with sympathy, yes, even the counter-revolutionaries! Throughout, all are subject to terror: the Red Terror, or the White Terror.

One episode involves a dedicated young woman communist, hell-bent on “getting a case [investigation of a counter-revolutionary cell] moving.” She is enthusiastic, relentless, and totally committed to the cause, with little thought for…well, anything. She cracks the case. It turns out that a well planted worker is actually an enemy agent, and the lover of a formerly middle-class young woman. Turns out that this woman was friendly with a well-respected, energetic, young communist agent, Arkady. The woman’s brother was ‘suspected’ of something – wasn’t everyone? – and was hauled in for questioning. Arkady knew immediately it was all garbage, and got the fellow released. Now the man’s sister is known to be the lover of a man who is known to be an enemy of the people, and Arkady released his brother! He’s done for, and he knows it. Osipov, his friend, arrests him. “What have you done, my poor old friend, what have you done!” They shake hands.

Later, another mutual friend visits Osipov and challenges him on the arrest of Arkady: “You know brother, we’re committing a crime.”

“A crime?” Osipov tossed back at him. “Because one of us got hit this time around? Don’t you understand that one must pay with one’s blood for the right to be pitiless? Do you by any chance imagine that we won’t all end up like that?”

Class war is a dirty business, but “it must be done.” These views recur again and again through the books. With views like that, people will do anything.

The Case of Comrade Tulayev may be Serge’s best known novel, and I found it to be the most extraordinary of the three. It takes place at the height of the Great Purge of the late 1930s triggered by the assassination of Kirov. A young man gets hold of a revolver, determined to kill Stalin. On his nightly walks, he actually sees him occasionally, stepping into a limousine at a Kremlin gate. With the revolver in hand, he approaches the gate again, and Stalin is there! But he totally looses his nerve, and walks on. A little later, he sees another Party boss – it’s Tulayev, yes, certainly it’s that murderous scum! He’s being dropped at the door of his mistress’ apartment. He walks up to him, shoots him, and runs. The ripples of terror immediately spread far and wide.

The chapters of the novel tell the story of Party members caught in the net of the pseudo-investigation into the murder. There must be a conspiracy of course: how could it be otherwise? Most of them end up dead, shot for their invented complicity in the international plot against the Socialist state. Among the victims: a long-exiled party member brought in from his Siberian house-arrest for interrogation; a young woman studying textile production in Paris on a plush-assignment (her father is a bigwig in the police organs – he is arrested too) who reads of the arrest of a former teacher and makes the fatal mistake of sending a telegram to papa demanding that he help the man; a commissar working in Spain – just what was Stalin’s aim in the Spanish Civil War? – who intercedes to help a young American communist arrested as a Trotskyite [He actually confronts Stalin in the Kremlin, and is let off with a posting to Siberia to work in forestry.]

One victim, in prison, is visited by another old Bolshevik who has been broken. He urges the resister to give in, confess to whatever is asked:

Better men than you and I have done it before us. Others will do it after us. No one can resist the machine. No one has the right, no one can resist the Party without going over to the enemy. Neither you nor I will ever go over to the enemy…And if you consider yourself innocent, you are absolutely wrong? We innocent? Who do you think you’re fooling? Have you forgotten about our trade? Can Comrade High Commissar for Security be innocent? Can the Grand Inquisitor be as pure as a lamb? Can he be the only person in the world who doesn’t deserve the bullet in the neck which he distributed like a rubber-stamp signature at the rate of seven hundred per month on the average? Official figures – way off, of course. None will ever know the real figures…”

As someone wrote of Kruschev, commenting on his secret speech denouncing Stalin’s crimes, he too was up to his elbows in blood. They all knew the score. They had quotas for arrests, imprisonment, execution… Amazing that through all this, Serge still manages to convey why these people got into this in the first place: their intense thirst for justice, fairness, an end to the crushing tyrannical poverty of the old regime, and a deeply felt desire for a society in which human equality is prized. To note this as an irony is so obvious as to be ridiculous.

Unforgiving Years is the last of the three that I read, and the strangest in many ways. In this book, Serge adopts a style that is at times elliptical, modernistic, and sometimes seems hallucinatory. It is the tale of a communist agent who has had enough – he can’t go on, and he decides to escape to Mexico. He knows the machinations of the security apparatus and how hard they are to evade, and he knows that his knowledge only gives him a little head start over his inevitable pursuers. There’s also the business of his lover: he wants to take her too, and that makes it harder.

The novel seems like a screenplay for a political film noir, but the level of tension, paranoia, and sheer horror exceeds anything from that genre. At times, I felt that Thomas Pynchon had cribbed the entirety of Gravity’s Rainbow, from Serge:

In every war there is a rear that holds better than the front, a rear fat with noble sentiments, creature comforts, and lucrative deals: this rear, which balances the front, makes the insanity total…The beaches of California still exhibit, in season, a full complement of pretty women with smiling thighs: such is the natural order of things. After all, there’s philosophical solace to be found in the fact that some still live while others die, an obvious improvement on everyone dying…But it is no longer possible to embark upon a coherent line of reasoning without falling into absurdity.

This novel was published in English in 1970, about the time Gravity’s Rainbow came out, but who knows? Maybe Pynchon read it in French?

The ending of the story takes place in a paradisaical Mexican mountain setting but has all the weirdness and menace of the finale of Jim Thompson’s The Getaway. Knowing as we do the end which Trotsky met in hiding, it is no surprise what happens, but just how the long arm of the Party reaches out to crush those who stray is terrifying nevertheless.

Not exactly happy reading these three books, but Victor Serge is a novelist for the ages – brilliant!